Introducing AdWords Smart Display. A New Tool That Will Help you Succeed on Display

Every marketer asks themselves, what is the most impactful way to serve my audience, and how manageable are my display campaigns? As they have targeted their audience, they have to make sure that their ads are tailored to every type of consumer. Google has now facilitated this to advertisers by introducing Google Smart Display campaigns.

Google Smart Display campaigns are an excellent way to scale up account performance using conversion date as a source of information to determine what websites could be delivering high-quality traffic with a high likelihood of converting the visits into customers.

How do smart display campaign work?

This is a campaign type on its own and it is fully automated. The user is not required to select any sort of targeting method, the only requirement is to select the ad contents and images. Google will match the different ad contents and images to the available placements on the display network.

First, Google uses data-driven learnings to identify users that are more likely to convert, and then places ads on the display network while consumers are browsing and potentially deciding on a purchase.

When should I use smart display?

Smart display requires data to work, and ideally, it requires display conversions to work at its full potential. It is recommended to have good performance on search and remarketing and/or display before investing in it.

Smart display requires you to insert a target CPA and therefore selecting the right value will have an enormous impact on performance.

Our recommendation is to target your current average CPA on display. This is because the CPA from search has been generated by targeting people that are specifically looking for you and therefore it doesn’t perfectly go along with display ads which target users that are not necessarily searching for your product right now.

This is why it is super important to preferably test display select only after getting enough conversion data to help Google find the right users for you. Aside from this, Google makes sure to gather all the right insight from relevant websites and apps that help ads reach their maximum performance.

What is the difference with a standard display campaign?

Google AdWords offers thousands of potential targeting combinations on display and traffic on millions of placements. This means that finding the right target group can be challenging to say the least! Succeeding on standard display will take a few trial and errors and consequently some of your marketing budget.

Smart display is going to find the most performing target groups for you based on your current clients and therefore the chances to succeed are much higher. This also comes with a great scaling potential because of the huge network that will be available for advertisers.

This type of campaign also makes sure to leverage on all of your assets, making sure you don’t go over your budget.

What best practices can I use to boost my performance on display select?

There are a few rules that should be followed to maximize the overall performance of Smart Display. First of all, you need to select a budget to work with. Google recommends selecting a budget that is at least 10 times your target cost per acquisition to give the campaign the change to test different targeting and bidding options.

Giving a lower budget than 10 times the target CPA will likely result in a higher cost per conversion, therefore having the probability of going over budget. Allowing a budget higher than 10 times the CPA will simply increase conversions volume but it won’t increase your CPA. However, as for every online marketing campaigns, it is a best practice to increase the budget gradually to determine whether the campaign could be a good fit.

The second golden rule of smart display is to test multiple ad variations to give Google the opportunity to find ads that perform at a lower CPA. The more ad variations you test, the merrier it is. With all of the insight that it’s gathered, Google makes sure to leverage your assets.

Additionally, it is extremely important to not make changes for a couple of weeks after launching the campaign. Google will reach top performance in two to three weeks, by making changes to the ads will simply reset the algorithm and start the optimization from scratch again.

Finally, as we already mentioned, you should choose the right CPA. Google recommends choosing the average conversion rate of display campaigns or at least to exclude brand terms conversions from the overall CPA formula. This is because brand terms convert at a very low cost per conversion since people are already looking for your products or services.

By introducing Smart Display campaigns, Google has made sure that marketers have control over what is happening to their ads and where can they choose to show their ads. They have focused on simplicity and making sure that your ads are performing over their potential. As this type of strategy is fully automated, it makes sure that your ads resonate with the insight that it has gathered while making sure marketers get the most according to their budget.

I’m So Confused!!

Don’t worry. We’re here to help. Hire an AdWords expert today from Yael Consulting and we’ll help set up and optimize your campaigns.